


Like Matins, the Morning Song of Birds

by aegle



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Late Night Conversations, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-28
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-24 22:44:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10751316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aegle/pseuds/aegle
Summary: Here is a path from his body to hers.





	Like Matins, the Morning Song of Birds

Autumn slipping through the fence rails. 

Sirius cups his hands around a low flame and says, his cigarette bobbing, "You do, don't you?" 

In the parlor, they've unlatched the windows and let them open. Sirius and Tonks sit across from one another, each having claimed a tatty sofa, Sirius smoking the corner shop cigarettes she's brought him. _Thank you, you're a very sweet girl_ mumbled as he'd torn off the cellophane. Tonks with her legs propped on the rounded sofa arm, turning a glass of whisky in slow spirals on the floor. 

He's asked it with the confidence of someone accustomed to being right, as he often poses questions to her. Not questions, but declarations. Always with the same tone, one which suggests the futility of argument, a sliver of amusement lodged in it. 

"Why are you so keen to know?" 

"I think it'd do him a measure of good." Smoke twines blue-grey around his fingers and dissipates. He shrugs, then reaches down for his glass. When he's finished it, he pours another.

All evening they've been playing recovered teenage records (a stack shoved far beneath his bed, some haphazard collection of skinny-legged rock musicians on their covers). That anything boyish had escaped destruction in the wake of his exit, nineteen seventy-five, continues to surprise her. 

"God, you make it sound so charitable," she says, crossing her legs at the ankles. A strip of paint hangs overhead, shedding like bark. She watches it catch in the breeze: a rapid, fluttering motion, building and swelling and going still. Mick Jagger's voice whining from the record player: jangling honky tonk, songs about dim bathrooms and bordellos. 

"Psh, I didn't mean it like that, and you know it. He's had a shit time of it, Remus. It strikes me as an exciting development, this infatuation of yours." 

"I never said I was interested in him. You did." 

"So I did." 

He's horribly on the mark, of course, but she's not jumping to tell him as much. Her pulse catching in her throat, a dust-soft flicker; all the cautious vocabulary filling her mouth. Words that flit the tongue against teeth. Delicate sounds, harsh sounds—easy to misinterpret. She swallows them. 

Her fingertips press against the glass. She finishes her drink, then asks, not looking at him, "Has he said anything to you?" 

"Ah, there it is." Sirius snuffs out his cigarette on an empty tea saucer. Hand-painted garden roses circling it. Ash grinding into the bone-white china. "I've got you now, Nymphadora. No back-peddling." There's something like glee in his voice, rising. "I really can't recall. Shall we call him down and ask him?"

"You're awful." She tosses a cushion at him for emphasis. He catches it, just barely. Whisky sloshes on his trouser leg. 

"Everyone's a little bit awful. All your heroes and saints—all of them." He smiles and reclines again, and she turns onto her side, frowning a little. "No, he's not said anything to me, but as you're taking this very convincing denial line, I can't see that it matters much." 

This will be the end of it. He's in a mood for reminiscence; for speaking in a language accessible only to those traveling alongside him. References to names she does not know, histories she cannot reassemble. _Meadowes set the entire place on fire, the heat was incredible. All because of a smoke. Bloody Gauloises. The fags of the French Resistance. Liberté. Freedom. In saecula saeculorum._

Remus, when he is present, saying with a smile, _Amen_ , and returning to whatever task is at hand; sometimes no task at all but simply sitting, listening to Sirius and responding in turn, and if her toes end up beneath his thigh or his hand rests near her ankle in their shared space, there are no efforts to draw up fresh boundary lines. 

Remus, who is upstairs with intercepted correspondence, trying to piece it together behind a closed door. 

"You're a terrible drinking partner," Sirius tells her. "I think you oversold yourself."

"What do you think 'I can't do much, I've work in the morning' means, exactly?" 

He sighs. "Look, I was going to check in on him, but you're here, so perhaps you ought. Make sure he's not running himself into the ground—you know he does fucking try." Lips around a fresh cigarette: "Take your kit off. That should grab his attention." 

  


 

  


Up the narrow stairs, her hand running along the banister, the gas-lit corridor coming into view and the soft shine from beneath his bedroom door. She knocks. 

 

  


  


"Are you—I brought you some tea, if you want it." 

"Have you been here long? I would have come downstairs." 

"Couple of hours. Spending quality time with family." 

"Then it's good I didn't interrupt." 

"You might have. Sirius is chasing the end of a bottle; I can't keep up." 

"You might have come up sooner, then." 

His room is no more disorganized than the last time she'd stood in it. Parchment and scrawled notes, books splayed belly-open on his desk; a slightly arcane feel to the arrangement, but then, there's something of the arcane about Remus himself, his schedule erratic—coming and going from the house into the cold morning or the last yellow hours before sundown, his conversations pleasant but brief, the bulk of his thoughts and plans and emotions cleanly sequestered. 

She hands him the cup of tea. 

"Sirius said you've been making progress with the letters."

"I thought so, but it's proving more complicated than I expected." 

A pattern newly emerged in their conversations, their exchanges tempered by careful politeness, rendering them toothless.

It's been this way for weeks—late September, when she'd fallen asleep next to him, pale dawn blooming in his bedroom. A gentle entanglement of their wrists and ankles. Waking, hours later, the noon light heavy and her brain thick with sleep. Visions of hard sex in the unmade bed, his sleeping arm draped over her hip; the fever-rush of arousal following. 

They'd not mentioned it—what had there been to mention? Nearness, proximity, touch. Sleeping under the antiphonal singsong of starlings, their bodies mirrored. Breath, lungs, lips mirrored. 

Afterward, sitting in her over-bright office, her nerves still burning, she'd found the idea of a midday meeting a terrible and hilarious interruption, but an interruption to what? Even now, the last bit of gold-oil whisky on her tongue, she doesn't have the nerve for confessions. The thought of his hipbones curving into hers sends a flush over her skin and silences her. What would she have said, then, in that bed? What sound might have slipped past the barrier of her mouth? 

So they stand, London quieting beyond them. 

  


 

  


Next to him on the settee. No records; the city-sounds filtering in (a siren wailing through the streets, ghostly). She tucks her legs beneath her, looking at him.

She's in love with his profile. 

It makes her feel a little alarmed. Irritated, too, with Sirius in a distant, half-hearted sort of way—smoke in his mouth, his youth spilling around him. Through his tired fingers. Down into the floorboards. 

Remus says, "Did you have any pets when you were a child?" 

"Proper pets, like cats or dogs? No. Did you?"

"No." He shakes his head. "I nodded off earlier thinking about the fox that used to terrorize the garden; my mother kept hens. Terrible for them, but I was always privately amused that it managed to avoid being caught." 

"Can't imagine why you'd be thinking about being caught," she replies, and he smiles into his tea. 

In the easy quiet of his bedroom, laughter keeps war at a distance. The threat of capture, the threat of loss, nights illuminated by spellfire: all flaring at the edges— peripheral, unreal. Some mornings when she is pouring milk into her tea her hands shake and she thinks of him, very far from her sunlit kitchen, and expects his absence when she arrives at the row of terraced houses; on these days she finds excuses to touch him, to confirm the solidity of one forearm or shoulder.

"We had goldfish," she tells him, her cheek against her palm. She watches the long motion of his arm, the mug coming to rest on the desk top. "The pond was full of them. I remember one winter being so concerned that they'd freeze beneath the ice, I made to rescue them. Mum stopped me as I was preparing to march into the water." 

"What would you have done?"

"Something disastrous, surely." 

Here is a path from his body to hers: his smile striking an ache in her belly, where she sits, famished; her fingers searching for something to do—the benign action of drumming them against the upholstery. 

"What were you like when you were younger? " she asks him. "Would I recognize you?"

"Would I recognize _you_?" he replies, sounding amused. Leaning his head against the back of the sofa: "What was I like? Idealistic. We all were. Concerned with being a part of something. Less serious in some ways, more serious in others." His eyes on her. "But you mean younger still. Would you know me as a child? Some sort of fundamental, unchanged part of myself? It's hard to say." 

"I would, I think." Glancing away, she cannot say this without feeling wholly exposed. "At any rate, I think there's something familiar; something that sticks—a way to connect past and present." 

"Possibly," he replies. She leans her forehead into the warmth of her hand; it covers her eyes in shadow as she smiles, embarrassed by her own questions. Sitting in his room near midnight, her footing unsure. As though she might unravel him. She thinks she could spend years discovering him; it would surely take years. 

She does not understand, for instance, his door left cracked. His mannerisms; his way of distancing her and inviting her nearer, sometimes within the same breath. His habit of wordlessly acknowledging her—placing beside her a cup of tea, moving whatever clutter might prevent her from sitting, sometimes engaged in other conversations so that it seems a sort of bodily response to her presence. The door she can interpret no better; his hand on it, the black line of the hallway visible, running down the room like thread. 

"It's late," she says. "And you've work still." 

In the motion of standing, their bodies draw together. He slows, looking at her, and she faces him. She cannot help it, skimming her fingers over his cheekbone, the hot pulse of blood in her. His fingers around her wrist, then his mouth against the blue veins, barely touching lips to skin. She thinks anything more than a whisper might go shattering through the room. 

"I'll walk you down."

"Yes." 

  


 

  


 

The entry hall, against the front door. Quiet, both trying to still the sound, her mouth opening to him. Kissing her under the long lights, their shadows stretching down the walls. 

  
  


 

 

She bathes until the water turns cool. In the nighttime silence of her flat: the shift of her body echoing. The green, camphorous smell of lavender; the pale rise of her knees. What she wants is rougher, more animalistic than love, which may exist simultaneously—the languid exploration of the body like an offering. What she wants is to be devoured, bent, a displacement of the self, an annihilation of the brain. 

Submerging herself, she listens to the sound of her own heartbeat; the distorted thump of an elbow against the porcelain wall. Water, when breaking over her skin, makes a noise like clapping. 

There is a strange, hallucinatory feeling to her present situation—the imprint of his mouth still warm, her eyes dark in the mirror. The word _consummation_ threading through her mind, a word she cannot stand. It manages to sound both clinical and deeply religious. Consummation occurs in strict bedrooms with starched sheets. 

She brushes her teeth with mint toothpaste and wonders if, seeing her, he will feel something like regret. She doesn't think she can endure an apology. She wonders, too, if he will lock the parlor doors and sink between her thighs so that she can weave her fingers into his hair and hold him there. 

Spit into the sink. Water sending it down the drain. 

 

 

  
  


Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, at least nine other bodies at the table, voices and mouths, lungs breathing. Someone talking too softly and being told to speak up, someone fidgeting a leg so that the sole of a shoe taps ceaselessly against the cold floor, someone coughing. _Ah! my poor dear child, the truth is, that in London it is always a sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be._ Austen. She'd not finished it. _Emma_ left on the floor of a childhood bedroom. Given at a birthday or perhaps for no occasion at all; she cannot remember. 

The shift of the tapping into a new rhythm, a bit faster. Someone complaining about the chill. 

His eyes on her.

The expanse of the table between them. 

 

 

  


  


She is the first one out of the kitchen. She wanders through empty rooms, the violet light of evening catching on each corner, sticking to her fingertips. As if she does not know where she is headed. As if to see where her legs might carry her. 

 

  
  


His bedroom is empty, as she expects it to be. The door left slightly ajar. He finds her caught there, motionless in the long corridor, when he steps onto the landing. She stares at him.

The only movement possible: his stride toward her, his hand on the back of her neck; chatter and exchanges rattling, mad, beneath their feet. They stand like this, breathing the same air; the holy strike of eye contact between them. Mouths coming together now, her body pressed into the wallpaper; his weight against her, lips on her frantic pulse as if to thieve it from her. Kissing until they are breathless; until her hips roll into him like a river. 

Looking at her, half-delirious. So close they cannot untangle themselves.

"Fuck me," she says. 

Breathing in the scent of his bed sheets, of shaving soap on his skin. Fresh new sweat—the taste of it on her tongue. 

Their noise is fantastic, all the wild thrill of moaning into each other's mouths while people trickle out of the house and into the nightlit streets, the sound muffled before it can reach them. His fingertips pressing into her skin and her teeth bared against his neck. When he lowers his head to breast or navel or thigh she arches up from the linens; he enters her gasping.

Later, she stands naked in the doorway to the small, connected bathroom (smiling, like a storm broken, the heels of her feet light) and drinks water from a blue-grey cup. A slight metallic taste. He watches her from the bed, and watches her still as she deposits the cup on his bedside table and climbs next to him, all her nakedness open to him. She wants to roll and luxuriate in this freedom; to walk nude through the cool darkness of the house, down to the kitchen where fresh blackberries sit on the counter-top; to eat them in his bed; to kiss him after, and leave their sweetness on his lips. 

She reaches over and touches the hollow of his throat. Lying beside him, their bodies curved toward each other. 

"I want to remember everything about this, right now," she says. "Everything between us." 

 

  


  


_God_ , she whimpers, _fuck_. Pushing herself against his mouth.

 

  
  


In the dawn-hushed hours of his bedroom, _this is, this is_. Chests rising with sleep, skin warmed by skin. Autumn slipping through the fence rails. Outside, the morning song of birds.


End file.
